In a mobile vehicle communication system, a user occasionally needs to be alerted regarding natural disasters or crises that could impact upon the mobile vehicle being operated by the user. Such natural disasters or crises include floods, earthquakes or hurricanes. Other crises include large-scale traffic accidents or civil crises. The regions surrounding these crises are generally demarcated by government agency and the GPS coordinates for these regions are made available to the mobile vehicle communication system.
A particular disaster may span a finite or indeterminate amount of time. For example, a disaster alert such as a hurricane warning may be posted, alerting residents in the projected path of the hurricane to evacuate. The hurricane makes landfall, and potentially creates a disaster area. The disaster and its accompanying disaster alert may span the hurricane warning, landfall, and any clean up or recovery period following the land fall.
Currently disaster alerts typically come to all users, for example, over a vehicle's radio, but are not targeted specifically to users who are in or are nearing the disaster region. Moreover, if the user has the radio off, s/he will not hear the alert. Current disaster alerts tell, for example, what the disaster is and where the disaster is taking place. The alerts include warnings not to enter the disaster area or warnings what to do if in the disaster area.
It would be particularly desirable during a generalized disaster alert to target alerts to vehicles that are already in the region and even more desirable to pinpoint and alert vehicles that are nearing the region and could be turned away from it by a well-timed, pinpoint alert. It is also desirable to play the disaster alert to the user regardless of the status of independent features (i.e., the alert will play even if the radio is off). Additionally, it would be desirable to provide a disaster alert to vehicles without compromising the user's privacy by constantly tracking the locations of the vehicles. Moreover, it would be desirable to provide a disaster alert while keeping data transmission costs down (i.e. generalized disaster alerts to all vehicles will require more data transmission costs than disaster alerts pinpointed to fewer, specific vehicles).
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system and method for deploying disaster alerts so that they are targeted to vehicles in or near the disaster region. It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a method for deploying disaster alerts in a mobile vehicle communication system, and to overcome the obstacles described above.